Andrew Lang’s Ballades and Verses Vain is a selected collection that draws upon French fixed verse while ranging across books, literature, love, the seasons, mortality, classical mythology, and the pleasures of everyday life. Lang writes of blue china, rare books, literary reputation, worldly wealth, golf, cricket, roulette, and university life in a voice that moves between sincere nostalgia and playful satire. The later verses and sonnets evoke the River Tweed, summer and autumn, vanished love, and the passing of youth, while the “Post Homerica” poems imaginatively revisit Odysseus, Helen, Circe, the Sirens, and the world beyond Homer. Bringing together original poems, translations, classical allusion, formal experiment, humor, and reflection on death, the collection seeks to preserve fleeting beauty and memory through intricate rhyme and recurring refrains.
